First a best-selling book, then a musical, The Gruffalois one of those modern inventions that seems like it has always existed. Louise Eastmeets its creator
Few people are so famous they can get away with using just one name. There's Kate and Naomi for fashionistas; Tom and Katie for readers of Heat Magazine; Marian for those with radio-friendly problems and unavoidably, Paris, who's everywhere. But one name, I've discovered, really sorts out the "haves" from the "have-nots", and that is the Gruffalo.
After conducting an exhaustive poll (three Irish Timescolleagues, four friends and a taxi driver), I can reveal that those who have children are as familiar with the name as they are their own (more than their own during teething periods), while those who have none are a little more vague. "The Gruffalo? Wasn't he your one off Sesame Street?" was the taxi-driver's contribution. Although he only came to life in 1999, in a picture book created by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, the Gruffalo has by most people's reckonings, joined the Jabberwocky, the Hungry Caterpillar, the Cat in the Hat and Where the Wild Things Are'sMax.
To date, more than 3.5 million copies of The Gruffalohave been sold worldwide, and a musical of the book, running at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin until January, has been zipping between the West End and Broadway since 2000. In years to come, in other words, it is practically guaranteed that the toddlers of today will be wearing shrunken Gruffalo T-shirts to music festivals.
Author Julia Donaldson remembers the exact moment when she knew her monster with "knobbly knees and turned-out toes" was going to be huge. "Before the book had even been published, I was going to Venice for the weekend. I bought the newspapers before getting on the flight, turned to the reviews and there was a huge picture of the Gruffalo, describing it as a modern classic. I was walking on air."
Duncan Foster, who will play the Gruffalo in Dublin (opposite Sharon Thompson's Mouse), reckons the book's appeal lies in its satisfying plot - a mouse avoids becoming lunch by inventing a fearsome beast called the Gruffalo, only to come face to face with her own invention.
"When I first read the book," Foster says, "I felt like it had always existed."
In truth, The Gruffalowas very loosely based on an Oriental tale. "Originally," Donaldson recalls, "it was going to be about a tiger, but I couldn't think of any words to rhyme with 'tiger'." Instead, the lines, "Silly old fox, doesn't he know/ There's no such thing as a ____ " stuck in her mind. "So it had to be something with three syllables ending with 'O'. And then 'Grr' sounds fierce, and maybe there's a bit of buffalo in there."
Rhyme also dictated the much-loved specifics of his appearance. Donaldson drew up two columns. On one side she listed knees, teeth, tongue and prickles, on the other, attributes such as colour, texture and type. Whatever rhymed went in. Donaldson's words were then dispatched from her home in Glasgow to illustrator Axel Scheffler's in London, and the Gruffalo was born.
"Axel's a genius," says Donaldson, who has worked with Scheffler several times since she first started to write in 1993. "I can't imagine the Gruffalo looking any other way now. But there are illustrations in other books I never get used to. I still think, 'No that's not what she looks like." When it came to turning a picture book which takes no more than five minutes to read into a 45-minute stage show for the over-threes, English theatre company Tall Stories made the unusual decision not to use elaborate costumes and special effects but to rely on imagination alone.
"It's theatre of the purest kind," enthuses Duncan Foster. "You're making a story come alive out of nothing. Children do that naturally. If you say a brush is a hedgehog, they're fine with that. It's actors who need to learn to play all over again."
Over the years, the production may have got more elaborate (the lighting, in particular, is now a tour de force) but the show still relies, for the most part, on a lot of very catchy tunes and the kind of physical theatre which sees the Snake turned into a rhumba-ing Latino and Fox a wheeler-dealer in tweeds.
For children, the magic lies in seeing the Gruffalo come to life and in hearing rhymes they know belted out by hundreds of other kids. For the actors, that familiarity can provide pitfalls of its own. Foster, a veteran of children's theatre, once played the father in Eric Carle's classic, Papa, Please Get The Moon For Me. "At the very end of the book, Papa uses a ladder to fetch the moon, so of course when I come out at the start of the show and say 'how will I fetch the moon?' all the kids shouted 'Get a ladder'. I had 20 minutes to fill in." Then there was the time a tiny heckler suggested Geppetto escape from the belly of a whale by setting fire to Pinocchio.
For Julia Donaldson, the stratospheric success of The Gruffalois something of a double-edged sword. Although she is reaping the rewards of its success (and even puts on her own show, Gruffalo and Friends, with the help of her doctor-cum-musician husband) she says it is strange to be continually asked about just one of her 79 books.
"Sometimes I feel a bit like the Mouse who makes up this thing, the Gruffalo, and then meets one in the forest. I invented the Gruffalo and now I see it everywhere I turn. He even turned up in The Archers the other week. I was listening and thinking, 'Well The Archers isn't real but the book is' and of course, The Gruffaloisn't real. Or is he? What's real here?"
The Gruffalo is at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin until January 6th. Tickets cost €22. For reservations, see www.tivoli.ie or tel 01-4544472. The Gruffalo, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, is published by Macmillan, priced £5.99 in UK